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I'm an 18-year-old girl who was raised Catholic, but ever since I can remember, I've always been prone to lustful thoughts, even when I was way too young to be thinking about those sorts of things.
I went to a non-Catholic school for 12 years, and I was surrounded by very unsupervised, uncatechized kids who made me feel like my lustful feelings were nothing to avoid or be ashamed of. Recently, I've been really trying to make an effort to resist these thoughts and stop masturbating, but I realized I was never really taught about this topic or told when these things actually become mortal sins. In fact, I was taught the polar opposite of the truth by my classmates.
For example, I know people who will make inappropriate jokes that will sometimes go over my head. I can tell that they are at least a little inappropriate, but I still go and look them up on my computer, only to find out that they are really sexually graphic in nature.
I know a mortal sin requires full consent of the will, so if I merely stumbled upon something sexual by chance and didn't look further into it, it wouldn't be a sin. But I did fully consent to look those inappropriate things up, not out of want for arousal, but out of curiosity or wanting to fit in.
So would this be a mortal sin, venial sin, or no sin at all?
Ruth
{ Since I was raised among uncatechized kids, would these lustful thoughts be a mortal sin, venial sin, or not a sin at all? }
Eric replied:
Ruth,
Whether they are were mortal sins or not, it's important to bring them (both masturbation and exploring things you knew you were better off not exploring) to the sacrament of Confession expeditiously and receive healing from the wounds they inflicted on your soul. A priest-confessor is trained to help you sort out things like this. (We are lay people, so we are not trained for such discernment, which couldn't really be offered over the Internet anyway; we can only lay down principles.) Curiosity in this regard is a vice; you will find you are better off remaining innocent of such things. It's certainly understandable that you want to "fit in"; this is a salient characteristic of adolescence, but it doesn't last forever and you probably are heading more toward establishing yourself as your own person and not needing to fit in as much as you used to. So the bottom line is, don't compromise your morals to fit in.
There are three things required for a sin to be mortal:
Grave "matter", meaning it has to be something objectively serious, and generally things touching on sexuality are grave matter;
Full knowledge, i.e. you have to know it is gravely wrong;
Full consent of the will; you have to do it freely, kind of like premeditated murder in cold blood in that you need to have sufficient reflection to realize you are doing something wrong, have an opportunity to choose, and deliberately choose absent any pressures to commit the sin.
For example, if you said, "I know this is a serious sin, and I don't care, I'm going to do it anyway," that would constitute a mortal sin.
With respect to masturbation, the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches:
Offenses against chastity.
.
.
2352 By masturbation is to be understood the deliberate stimulation of the genital organs in order to derive sexual pleasure.
"Both the Magisterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action." (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Persona humana 9)
"The deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose." For here sexual pleasure is sought outside of "the sexual relationship which is demanded by the moral order and in which the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love is achieved." (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Persona humana 9)
To form an equitable judgment about the subjects' moral responsibility and to guide pastoral action, one must take into account the affective immaturity, force of acquired habit, conditions of anxiety or other psychological or social factors that lessen, if not even reduce to a minimum, moral culpability.
Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd Ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), pp. 564–65
So if you are trying to stop masturbation and can't, there may be mitigated culpability there; but nevertheless, the sacrament of Reconciliation offers you grace to free you from the grip of the habit, though it may take years to overcome it.
Finally, I would offer this Scripture "Do not be deceived: "Bad company ruins good morals."" (1 Corinthians 15:33, RSV2CE) Avoid friends that drag you down morally. I know it is tough to find alternatives, but keep this in mind.
Eric
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